Nokia after youngsters with new C6 and C7 Symbian touchphones with free maps, social apps, and cool games

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Nokia's smartphones chief Jo Harlow with the C6 and C7.

In addition to the E7, Nokia’s latest flagship business smartphone, the C6 and C7 were launched at Tuesday’s Nokia World showcase in London. They are being billed as offerings for the social generation.

All three phones run a new Symbian^3 software that comes with a sleek user interface, social networks integration, a greater number of third-party apps and shiny games, and a bunch of multimedia features.

Nokia’s markets chief Niklas Savander stressed at the London conference that Symbian is the #1 mobile operating system in the world. He said the latest Symbian 3 version was rewritten from the ground up to be “faster, easier to use, more efficient, and more developer friendly,” while offering 250 new features and improvements.

The C7 is a high-end, metal-clad consumer phone for social types. It sports a 3-5.inch AMOLED display (640×360) with tactile feedback and a glass window, FM radio and transmitter, live updates from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and more.

The C6 is a more affordable, compact C7 variant, sans a stylish stainless steel and glass design, 3.2-inch AMOLED display with Nokia’s ClearBlack technology, and and a bunch of preloaded apps and games.

Like the E7, both C-series phones pack in an eight-megapixel camera with dual LED flash for taking images and recording 720p video, but only the E7 and C6 have an additional VGA camera for video calling. Both the C6 and C7 also trump the E7 with twice the storage – up to 32GB via microSD memory cards (plus 8GB of onboard memory on the C7 for 40GB in total). The new C6, C7, and E8, in addition to the Nokia N8, will go on sale in the fourth quarter of this year, in time for the Christmas shopping season.

The new lineup comes in times when Nokia is coping with the departure of its smartphone chief Anssi Vanjoki and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, to be succeeded by Stephen Elop who ran Microsoft’s business division. In addition to the reshuffling of its top management, Nokia is struggling to find the right answer to iPhone’s popularity and Android’s market share growth. As a result of Apple’s and Google’s strides, Nokia’s cellphone market share dropped to 34.2 percent in the second quarter of this year, down from 36.8 percent a year ago, Gartner estimated.

In addition to new phones, Nokia also revamped the Ovi Store, its cloud repository for mobile apps, themes, wallpapers, music, and other downloadable content. Now available in 190 countries, the Ovi Store sports “a friendlier look and feel” while offering more content, easier navigation, and better integration with carriers’ own stores. A new Ovi Maps beta adds greater map detail, real-time traffic, safety alerts in or out of navigation mode, visibility to parking and petrol stations, speed limit warnings, and visibility to subways, trams, and trains in 85 word cities.

A new SDK is also out, adding in-app purchase and allowing for a 70 percent reduction in the number of code lines in Symbian apps. And thanks to the Motally acquisition, developers will now enjoy more detailed analytics. The company hopes that 175 million Nokia Symbian devices is a big enough incentive for developers to take notice.